Forgiveness, Trust & Forever

Hero

The first time Emily let me stay in the bedroom again, nothing happened.

Which was somehow more intimate than if everything had.

No dramatic music.

No hands pulling at clothes.

No desperate proof that we were fixed because our bodies remembered each other.

Just rain against the window, Eleanora asleep in the nursery under the clouds and stars mobile, and Emily standing beside the bed in an oversized T-shirt with paint on one sleeve.

Soft blue.

Living room paint.

She had insisted it would wash out.

It had not.

I stood in the doorway like an idiot.

Not outside.

Not inside.

The exact physical representation of emotional limbo.

Emily looked at me.

"You can come in."

I swallowed.

"I know."

"You're hovering."

"I'm respecting boundaries."

"You're loitering with trauma."

"That feels more accurate."

Her mouth twitched.

The bedroom was different now.

Not completely.

The bed was the same.

The old chest of drawers was the same.

One of my jumpers sat on the chair in the corner, which would have been ordinary once and catastrophic three months ago.

Now it just sat there.

Present.

Allowed.

The walls had changed.

Not paint yet.

Not fully.

But we had stripped away the old pictures. The old postcards. The framed photo of us from before everything, which Emily had taken down with shaking hands and then placed in a drawer instead of a bin.

That mattered.

The room no longer looked like a shrine or a punishment.

It looked unfinished.

That was better.

Unfinished meant possible.

Emily folded back the duvet.

"I'm tired."

"You should sleep."

"I mean with you here."

My breath caught.

She looked away instantly.

"I don't mean-"

"I know."

"Don't do the face."

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm trying not to."

"Try harder."

I stepped into the room.

One step.

Then another.

The floorboards creaked beneath my feet, same as they always had.